Blizzard Suspends Professional Hearthstone Player for Hong Kong Comments

Good for the people of Hong Kong.

The topic of Hong Kong didn't struck me as sensational/desperate as it deserves until a Hong Kong friend send me this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yXTHODE24Q Am moved by the clip, especially for the first 50s. It is english sub-ed. Would recommend anyone interested in the topic give it a look

That's definitely not true. Hong Kong has been discussed a great deal here, and China even more. These are probably the most-discussed topics of the last month; if not, I can't think of what would be. Perhaps climate change.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Just as interesting are all the instances where stories gained dozens of upvotes but very few comments, because they disappeared from the front page within a few hours after rising to the first spot. It's very easy to see even from the outside, if you simply filter for stories that are ranked lower than other stories that have a lower score, are older, and have more comments. Try this on for size:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

That even gets a few results of you increase the score to 100, e.g.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20304526

I remember seeing that just go poof back then. One moment it's at the top, then it quickly sinks, then it's on page 7824.

Just about any subject is discussed a great deal here, because "a great deal" is no hard qualifier at all. But I know few subjects so consistently suppressed and messed with here as Chinese totalitarianism. You could convince me otherwise with a database dump, by making votes and flags public, but not just with mere claims and saying you didn't notice anything. Maybe you didn't, but that really just proves you didn't notice it.

The hottest topics are both the most discussed and the most "consistently suppressed", as you put it. That sounds like an oxymoron, but it's just what happens when you have 10x more submissions than front page slots. Frontpage space is the scarcest resource on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

Because of this scarcity, everyone who feels strongly about a story feels that their story is being unfairly suppressed on HN, no matter how much coverage it's actually receiving relative to other topics. You seem to feel that Chinese political stories are being unfairly suppressed for who knows what reason—but there are at least as many users (probably many more) who feel that those stories are overrepresented and that HN is going downhill because of it. There's an email in the inbox right now saying so.

The actual moderation principles we use about all this are simple and have been the same for many years. Here they are: HN is a site for intellectual curiosity, so follow-up stories that don't add new information are mostly off topic, as are riler-uppers that don't gratify curiosity so much as stir up indignation and flamewar. When there have been a lot of stories about X lately, the bar for X stories gets raised; HN readers don't like it when the front page has a lot of stuff they've seen already. That's about it. The execution has a lot of subtleties, of course, but those principles fully explain what you're observing.

Writing something to graph the course of stories over time was just something I did for fun, then I noticed that stuff. And again, I'm talking about stories that are ranked lower (and that can mean much lower, several pages lower) than stories that have a lower score, are older, and have more comments.

This story has over 2300 points and is at #32 after 14 hours, would you say that's normal?

Seeing this for a few months now, I did kinda pull back from other threads, at least from long comments on trivial subjects. I don't feel okay, at all, discussing harmless things while important things that intersect with the responsibility of the tech aren't able to be discussed freely. If you then read that as caring so strongly about China [sic], that doesn't mean I just dreamed all that. Or that I do care so much, for that matter: I just dig into things, swiftly and as thoroughly as I can, I've done this with dozens if not hundreds of subjects, and being German this is right up an alley which is way bigger and way more important than even the CCP, from my perspective.

It's not that other don't seem to get flagged by users, too. But for months, it was like clockwork when it came to the CCP. Whenever I saw something gain traction, I paid attention, and without fail, it sank.

> HN is a site for intellectual curiosity

And new software point releases, neat little CSS tricks, anything to do with money and making money, and so on. Including human rights, and the intersection with tech and/or games.